Labourer walks into hospital impaled with iron rod

When a rod pierced his lower back and emerged from his lower abdomen, Nirmal Mahaldar, 22, told himself not to panic. “I did not shout and scream. I told myself that I should keep my cool to get myself out of this situation,” said Mahaldar, a day labourer. He called out to his friends at the Kandivli construction site. A hospital ambulance was immediately called for.

Mahaldar had climbed above his temporary shack on Sunday night to install some rods on the tin roof when he slipped and fell.

He was operated upon on Sunday at Sanjeevani Hospital, Malad, and the rod was removed from his body.

Mahaldar arrived at the hospital on foot as he could neither lie down nor sit in a wheelchair with a rod sticking out of his body from both sides. “I was almost standing in the ambulance. I was forced to walk into the hospital,” he said.

It is this level-headedness that saved his life, doctors say. “He could have died of shock. But he kept his cool. He didn’t faint. That is commendable,” said Dr Sunil Agarwal who operated upon Mahaldar, along with Dr Kunal Weling and anaesthesiologist Dr Kalpesh Shah.

Dr Agarwal explained that Mahaldar was lucky that none of his vital organs were harmed by the rod. “The rod had penetrated the mesocolone, a fat tissue that carpets the colon and supplies blood to the organ. I removed the rod from his back by increasing the size of the hole in the mesocolone so that the colon does not get damaged because of friction. We then stitched it back together,” he said.